To meet a mobile broadband requirement on high-speed data transmission, people switch their focus onto a millimeter wave band. Currently, the academic community refers to a band of 30 GHz to 100 GHz as a millimeter wave band. The millimeter wave band has a large available bandwidth. For example, in a band range of 60 GHz, bandwidth that is not licensed and can be used for free in each country is approximately 7 GHz to 9 GHz. In addition, directional transmission can be implemented relatively easily in the millimeter wave band. Therefore, the millimeter wave band can implement low-interference high-confidentiality communication at an extremely high data transmission rate. A base station may use a broadcast beam or a unicast beam in a millimeter wave band to communicate with UE (User Equipment, UE for short). An area that can be scanned by the broadcast beam is referred to as a broadcast coverage area, and a unicast beam scanned by the unicast beam is generally greater than the broadcast coverage area. The area that scanned by the unicast beam is greatly larger than a broadcast coverage area. An area between the area that is scanned by the unicast beam and an area of the broadcast coverage area is referred to as a unicast broadcast area. Because a millimeter wave transmission signal is attenuated fast, broadcast information sent by the base station to the UE is not applicable to transmission of an omnidirectional antenna. Therefore, how to receive broadcast information when the UE is in the broadcast coverage area or the unicast coverage area needs to be urgently resolved.